Guest Post: Performance Anxiety

Performance anxiety can, whether you're honest about it or not, cloud your decisions in this market. Do you cave to the relative performance derby in order to retain investors? Its a real issue if you've been on the wrong side of this market or any side for that matter. The volatility has made investors punch drunk. I'm talking about customers that say flat out: "If you don't get more invested, I'm pulling my account". How quickly they forget that 2 weeks ago they were of the opposite mindset.

Let me share my story - as I'm sure there are a million like it. I've been receiving daily calls from an investor for the last 3 months (yes, I should have already fired him). We've been in 70% cash, which two months ago - in his words - enabled him to sleep at night. Now he can't sleep and is constantly hyperventilating at all the money he is "losing" by being under-invested. Cramer put him over the edge last night, with something to this effect regarding money managers:

Publicly, they’ll stick to their guns and spin negative tales. But privately, they will be forced to buy because they’re so far behind in the market that their investors will demand their money back unless they change direction.

The investor called today to say that we had until the end of the day to be fully invested in his separate account. After hanging up - there I was: make the decision about whether to retain the assets or go against my better judgment and professional opinion. What's on the line ? Pride & Fidicuary duty vs. annual management fees.

Congratulations Cramer. The average investor is listening to you and is about to take it on the chin once again. Those of us in the real world, who prudently manage other people's money, don't change our stance daily (sometimes intraday) like you do in your nightly poison spew. We get paid to take a stance and be right more often than wrong... but most importantly...not lose money. You get paid to sing and dance, and investors get hurt by your cowboy bullshit.

What am I going to do about the investor?

I'm liquidating his account and sending him this book by Howard Marks with a note that says, "You should read this. Good luck."

Now I'm no saint. I'm just another guy, in the most overpaid industry in the world, trying to make a buck. If this investor was more than 10% of AUM, I'd be forced to reconsider. And if we had 20 investors with similar demands it would be a difficult call. That's the truth and that's reality.

i'm coming to this thread pretty late, but i think it's worth raising the possibility that cramer is a higher-level operative than many believe him to be. he worked for a certain firm, and for a certain individual at that firm, ahem, and with his nightly show he's well-placed to influence the public. i think it's possible that for a number of years he was doing his own thing, but now with the show he might be part of a team and no longer freelancing.

Cramers popularity shows the intelligence of the average investor. If you need a clown to give you advice then you are not mature enough for this activity. I have two children and the shows they watch on Nick Jr are easier for me to watch than that idiot Cramer. When the market goes down he will say that he told people to be careful even though the week before he was telling people to buy buy buy.

One day one his sheep will lose all their money and will go looking for him.

I'm impressed how this so-called investor actually got any money considering he thinks Cramer has a valid opinion (and track record). Investor-boy would've lost his ass 10 times over on "Buying Bear Stearns" or whatever type of foolishness was being hyped that day.

I suppose the real problem with idiot investors like this is that:

1. They get a lump of money either via inheritance or selling off some family property. The gist is that they didn't make the money, and likely don't have anyway to duplicate such a windfall again.

2. They think that their acct balance is a direct correlation to their IQ, so the *must* be smart if they've got this dough.

3. Getting on the phone to their fund mgr means that they are a big shot too, and via their self-annointed brilliance, merely being commanded by them will result in you (lowly fund mgr) magically bringing back even more money.

Back in the dark ages of early Oct. Cramer was telling his trailer-park audience to only consider stocks that pay a 5% dividend... now he's BACK with cow noises, booyah's, bells, sirens etc. - what a piece of garbage ...

I dont know anything about you or your company but I bet you arent as successful as cramer was a a hedge fund manager. He is a flip flopper, no doubt about it but he lets price tell him what to do and is quick to change his mind. I guarantee his record kicks the ass of yours so be careful with bashing people that are retired and rich cause of how good they were at playing this game of fear and greed

Cramer will impress me the day he admits what REALLY happened to his fund...... At least he hasn't been caught touting again- that was a sweet little scam he had going on, wonder where his buddies are now?

In Feb of 2009, Cramer stated on national TV that investors should get out of the stock market for the next five years. He sold 100% of his daughter's investment account when the Dow dropped below 7500. In other words, Cramer sold near the exact bottom. He told everyone to bail out right near the bottom. All of this can be verified on YouTube. I predict the Dow will form a MAJOR top near 13,000. It will then lose about 50% of its value in 2013 & 2014.

This particular crazy client is a different story (and why places like Merrill Lynch were invented) but generally speaking it's often not obvious or explicit how much of any given client's investable capital is under your management.

In other words, let's say if you run a value equity product. You may be managing most of one client's net worth but only a small portion of another's - and maybe the portion he has specifically designated for that style bucket. He's already allocated X to bonds and Y to cash and Z to something else.

Your job as far as he's concerned is to stay all-in (within your universe) at all times. Raise a bunch of cash at the wrong time (causing benchmark underperformance) and you've got one angry client - especially if he was relying on that one asset class to balance out weaker returns in other sectors/asset classes.

over the years i had similar "clients." the best policy from a management perspective was to let the client go, post haste, and concentrate on the best clients, meaning those who believed in the principle of mutually beneficial relationships.

If any of them were actually licensed, they would have been in jail ages ago.

I remember it must have been like 2000, early 2001, before 9/11, I was literally printing money in names like ASD, LMT, BA and CNBC were still pumping the same five stocks: CSCO, MSFT, DELL, EMC, & ORCL. Companies that had imploded before my very eyes. It was then that I decided CNBC was not much better than the Cartoon Network.

I feel for ya. My mother has a small simple IRA, ( 10k ish) from 2001. The Total amount invested was well over 20K, and I recently found out about it. The thing has been trolloped through a mirade of mergers. I disposed of the account and reballanced the remaining ponzi funds. It is now at break even! When you factor inflation/exchange rates, ect... She got hosed and I am thankfull I manage my own investments, and my mothers.

When I fly back over to HK next week, at least I will know my Mother is safe!

You may not be communicating well enough with your client. Most clients have clear expectations that you need to respect. They want to you to work hard to find opportunity and they want reasonably safe return. This means buy cheap and sell rich. This is your job. There was plenty of cheap equities a month ago.

A client has every right to question your judgement if you sat on a pile of cash after seeing this run-up. You aren't paid to sit on a pile of cash. I don't if that is what you are doing, just saying as an example. You are paid to achieve a better return than 100% cash.

Telling clients to eat a crap sandwich when they question you may put you out of business.

Do you really watch the television and believe anything you see? If you do, your mind is unhinged, and you are begging to be entertained by something that exists to sell you what you do not need. ever. There are no advertisements for useful products, and there is no restriction or requirement for anything to be true. ever. There is no live programming, because it is always behind a machine that delays it so that it can be edited. There is no programming that is not edited. There is no one that is not reading lines written for them by someone else. There is a law that all these people have to get paid to appear. Everyone that appears is paid to say what the party that hired them wants them to say. The people in news are hired because they don't ask questions or understand what they read, or are told to read by someone in a control room. If you watch a TV show about money, it is sponsored by people that want to make money off of you, and don't have to care how they do it, because they wrote the laws saying they could lie about anything. They don't let real people appear on live TV because they can't be controlled to deliver the desired message.

If you want to see when the last actual independent television station existed, look back to CNN in it's first year and watch how it changed. It is a sickening joke to think you get news from companies that have no reason, desire or requirement to give you anything except entertainment.

dear pirahana - 100% correct. the tv only exists for the advertising to get you to buy things you don't need with money you don't have. the 'content' is centered around those adverts. if you need something - you'll find it and you'll buy it regardless of the television. infact - it appears to me that the more they advertise something the less you probably actually 'need' it.

What bothers me with people is they don't hae a clue as to what a money manager has to worry about: which is really one of two things over the long haul: either debts will be inflated away and cause an ultimate crash in currencies or the world will do the right thing as many smart people think will happen--Prem Watsa, Kyle Bass, Hugh Hendry, etc--and the world will be forced to restructure it's debts (hard deflation) as the debts collapse on their own weight.

And the reality is no one fucking knows. And until one gets the data points for which direction we truly go, being prudent and conserative is really the only thing a money manager should do. But most people are living in a world right now--a window where all are bad habits for 40 years haven't caught up to us for the moment--where Unicorns really do shit skitttles.

Yes, fuck Cramer, but fuck you too. You are granted the privilege of managing investors' money because supposedly you are smart enough to spot value. Soooooo, two weeks ago, heck, two months ago, value was starting to become really obvious. If you weren't investing over the last two weeks, you don't deserve to be managing OPM.

I'd be extremely nervous if I were you. Silver stayed in a small range under $10 for about 20 years. Now, suddenly, its gone parabolic and has crashed >30% twice in the past 6 months. Doesn't sound comforting to me....

This parabolic/crash 'n burn cycle is nothing new to the silver market. It did the EXACT same thing in the late 70's and early 80's.... stayed in a long-term tight range, then went parabolic, then crashed back to >$10, where it stayed for 20+ years.

What kind of fool stayed 70% in cash during this major rally? Your client will be better off now without your help and so will you. No one needs daily calls to tell them how fucked up they are as a money manager. You already know that. The good news is that someone will do exactly what your client asked of you, the client will get what he justly deserves and you will avoid the lawsuit that follows. Cramer......he da man!

How on earth could an investment "professional" have 70% of a client's cash in exactly that - CASH - with Central Banks on a Zimbawe-esque monetization binge and with the vast majority all on the sidelines in September as evidenced by the 26%-32% bullish concensus all through that period and a 2b share increase in short interest? He gets paid 2 and 20 to manage cash rotting idle while the bankers debase the currency. Don't blame Cramer - your client is fortunate to be getting his money back so he can buy some hard assets and save himself the 2 ans 20.

Never underestimate the replacement power of equities within a Weimar Republic environment.

he doesn't say how long he's been in 70% cash and what the other 30% is, but he does tell us his client was sleeping great 2 months ago

now, he is not in the camp which is saying: "BUY! the bottom is in!"

but, his client is

so they split the sheets

your comments are good, i think, M_J, and you may have called this one better than he did, and "made more money in the market, %-wise" but risk/reward perceptions are not all the same, and this manager choose not to gamble with their "ultra high family net worth" at this point, probably for good reasons, altho not ones which "the market" as it now functions, would respect

the R2K (russell 2000 index) was @ 600 a coupla weeks ago, and is now 758, so that's +25% right there, after the giant dip

his link says his outfit works out of alabama and their trade is: "Our group runs several strategies for Ultra High New Worth Family Groups."

Think of the stack as a string of strings, each with a virtual/dynamic string to every other string. Everything is related to everything. Each string may always compute the address of every other string, through algebraic reduction(though it is seldom necessary), because, fundamentally, they are all the same string.

The only difference between strings is relativity, circulation of time/space, through the addition and subtraction of false assumptions (delay mechanisms), forming what appears to be an orbiting order, depending upon the perceiving string. Order is a false assumption, which creates delay.

So long as you net 0, you can separate strings to create any charge orbit, event horizon, you want, but removing one or more event horizons must balance the transformation.

Control is simple replication, automatically triggering algebraic reduction, which is why its resources are ever more efficiently reduced into implosion. All the proprietors have to do is net out debt, but then the curtain comes down, with no exit, so they delay, as volume shrinks and the environment automatically increases pressure. Time accelerates.

As provided, they have now brought out the same reorganized rumor so many times that there is no news, and the human bots shoveling out the news are locked into the bot algorithms driving the market, so the central banks cannot keep up with the increasing torque of the black hole. They cannot get back out in front of the parade without a little help.

Someone has to do the work and the manufactured majority is little more than a Peanuts gallery, which is bred to accept only replication as input, which then becomes the output, with all kinds of make-work sandwiched in between. Because they travel around a self-fulfilling prophesy, that’s all they understand.

They import ever cheaper disposable products, living ever more disposable lives, subsidized by ever cheaper slaves across the planet, and then moan and groan when they become disposable, constantly throwing away better in return for worse, relative to environmental demand, which expects greater diversity (When in doubt, reduce to the bipolar and choose based on the weather).

The result is like the friction heat of a virus reproducing in a petri dish. Pretty soon, the membranes (event horizons) explode, and because the proprietors have maximized efficiency across the global IC chip, in a mutually assured destruction design, they cannot unlock the reaction from within prisoners dilemma. But it is only their bred-in psychology locking them up.

The timing, location and strength of the cognitive ignition threshold will determine propulsion, because they have turned all the other variables in the combination lock into relative constants, through their own algebraic reduction. Where do you want to go, what kind of community education do you want, and to what end?

The strings are all already connected. The firing order depends upon the design perception, which must net all remaining event horizons out to 0 when you place them back on the stack. The greater the deviation, the longer it takes to recycle the products into their respective orbits. You can balance both sides of the fulcrum, the implosion and the new event horizon contact sets, or the fulcrum of fulcrums will do it for you.

You have one remaining “problem.” You cannot connect to the outermost horizon without proof of intent. That’s the nature of the semi-neutral middle class. Because the proprietors employed the gifted technology against the gifters, they will lose at least two event horizons, depending upon new community development. The process doesn’t change from their perspective.

Safeguard your own families, whether you believe in marriage or not, from the tyranny of the manufactured majority, socialism. The majority always seeks to simplify the everything to everything relationship, in a way it “thinks” will divert all energy to itself, with self-destructive hoarding, resulting in the false assumption of crony capitalism, scarce resources. Energy is a delayed perception.

You have a stack, which is a hash table, which is a virtual everything to everything relationship, which is a perception delay, which is 1/0 – bipolar, +/- infinity, depending upon the perceptions you care to share, which depends upon whether you want to be a bot or anti-bot, or whether you wish to seek/expand the unknown horizon. Design accordingly.

Enterprise architects give the corporations exactly what they want, psychographic anxiety control, without ruling out the future by embedding the AC into the DC, through productive time delay reconciliation. You might keep that in mind as you configure. A school of fish changes leadership with a frequency dependent upon the environment, resulting in symptoms across the event horizon timeline.

A little chaos, backlash effectively implemented, goes a long, long way to toward trapping the shark in prisoners dilemma. It will swim, die, or struggle, serving a purpose. Once you write the code for the hash table and test it on the equipment over time, you will see why the nuclear family is so important to looking glass operation.

Money as debt is a prisoners dilemma game, liquidating an economy of one quality product into two broken toys. Of course the proprietors/issuers want as much as possible in circulation, with as many levers as possible. Double-minded people are miserable and they love company, which is why the looking glass is a double-sided mirror, to give them what they want. The strait is there; stay between the lines.

Multiply the nature of social clicks you remember in HS by a thousand and you have the Fed, the ultimate make-work jobs program. The state of the economy on/off depends upon how often the lead fish throws the shark a bone. Jesus, humility, is the way, but he got caught being prideful and became Job. That’ll happen; just continue. The YMCA is run by feminists for a reason.

Prisoners Dilemma is the Golden Rule. PM is a temporary transition buffer. Stay in front of the curve. If you place them in a position to take advantage, they can’t help themselves. Use that to your advantage.

For the wannabe investors out there, when inflation goes up hard, (YOY CPI) , equities go DOWN to FLAT - CHECK OUT THE FACT BEFORE TALKING NONSENSE. Only in VERY HIGH/HYPERINFLATION will equities rise in nominal but you will get crushed in real terms (reason is bond yields will rise and pressure equities). In the current situation if the FED keeps trying to inflate and suppress interest rates (so far so good but cracks are appearing) equities will probably flatline between 1200 to 1400 - ranged and you will get crushed in real terms anyways. Equities are for suckers.

Anyone seriously considering investment advice from Cramer deserves it. Why, oh fuck, why would you listen to (even worse, heed the advice of) a hyperactive man-boy whose main attraction is a fisher price for 'adults' soundboard that would make any child with the cow-goes-moo toy jealous? Is it just me or can the US' collective intelligence be observed by this dumbass' day to day air time? Honestly, why would you voluntarily get screamed at?

There are gamblers and then there are desperate gamblers. n any case, the deck is stacked against all of them. Yet, they charge in, hoping that the tide of fortune turns their way, purely by force. In this debt manipulation, an ambush is certain.

Right there with ya, pal. The old saying is, 'there are a lot more bad clients then there are bad managers.'

Nothing against Cramer - I respect him for what he is: Entertainment. Whenever someone wants to ask my opinion about a Cramer/CNBC idea I tell them that I'm putting together a tracking basket of all those great ideas and they should put all their money in it. Jaws drop as I get that, 'Are you crazy?' look. I then tell them, "Now you know my opinion."

Eveyone's best interest is to survive. Cramer needs people to STAY IN THE GAME cause he has a show, an income, and ego etc. If people invest they might watch his show, if they give up he looses. He is does what everyone does which is what is in thier best interest. When we watch a video of Chris Martenson makeing perfect sense to me I still have to think "He sells Gold" Can I trust that, Peter Schiff sells gold. Do they have enough, they need cash, why. Don't they think they are loosing money buy selling gold for cash?